My Husband and My Eating Disorder

By Iris Ruth Pastor

My husband and I have been married for forty-one years and for thirty-five of those years I’ve been cheating on him with ED. He was my secret lover – a lover who had cost me my first marriage, a lover whose seductive clutches were fierce. I feared he would he cost me my second marriage too. But I couldn’t give him up.

ED – as in Eating Disorder, not Erectile Dysfunction(!) – was my constant companion. I binged and purged nightly to relieve stress, as a reward for getting through the day, as a coping mechanism to lessen anxiety and self-doubt, as an antidote to feeling the messiness of life. And I was intent on always keeping the two “men” in my life separate. ED and Steven both had their space: Steven in my bed, in my arms, in my heart. ED in all the other empty spaces.

Having such a loving, passionate relationship with my husband, how could I exclude him from my battle with bulimia? This is what I know:

I was so afraid I would lose him if I let him help me.

I firmly believed I could never overcome my bingeing and purging. And by bringing my husband Steven into the battle – into the arena – I could risk losing him. I couldn’t tolerate that.

I didn’t want Steven as my policeman; I wanted him as my lover.

Sometime during our second decade of marriage, I shed my shameful secret and shared it with Steven. I could tell he couldn’t really understand. He thought I threw up because I was nauseous. He thought I could just stop. He clearly didn’t know the power of ED.

Maybe in the ensuing months, Steven researched bulimia and learned more about its insidious influence. I don’t really know. At my insistence, we didn’t talk about it. But we did develop – over the years – an unwritten agreement: Coming downstairs after retiring early to bed each evening was off-limits for him and preparing and executing my binges and purges was something I did in solitude.

Iris Krasnow, in her book The Secret Lives of Wives, reminds us that with our increasing longevity, most of us will be married longer that most people used to live. If you have guts and are capable of surviving the exhausting tedium of child rearing, Krasnow says couples can sail through marital storms and reach a safe harbor. My husband and I had survived many things together: blended family issues, death of loved ones, bankruptcy, major health challenges, and relocation to another city. However, our lack of striving for clarity and our inability to communicate honestly and straightforwardly on my bulimia was eating away at our union and insidiously tarnishing our “golden years.”

Just months before Medicare kicked in, I very tentatively sought outpatient treatment for my bulimic behavior. And only after my outpatient treatment was well underway, did I begin to share the details of my addiction with Steven. I was learning to embrace the concept of clarity—the importance of being clear in my articulation—not only about what I didn’t want from him, but how to implement what I did want in from him in relation to my disorder, my treatment and my recovery. I emphasized that I wanted his support and caring, his interest, his researching the topic of disordered eating, his talking to professionals and his offering me both his findings and his point of view. These were points I had never expressed directly before. And I both admitted and apologized for shutting him out of the entire process of my treatment and recovery.

He, in turn, shared with me that his mistake was taking me so literally in my declaration of staying out of my way. Now, he learned to deflect my ambiguity. To probe for clarification. To be firmer in his own convictions of what his role as husband was and is. And to offer out loud what he was willing and not willing to do, so that, together, we could forge a workable plan for handling the adverse effects my addiction had on our intimacy and quality of partnership.

We began to honor our years of shared history. We began to recognize that in spite of the annoyances, irritations and petty squabbles, we cherished the history we had built together. Our map exists. We know the waves won’t topple us, even if we get submerged for a moment or two. We know where the lighthouses are to guide us safely home and where the undertows are to be avoided.

Too bad I couldn’t bring him alongside me as I battled my bulimia. My fear of losing him overrode the pull of letting him in. But today, we savor my recovery together and move forward knowing we can ride the waves of whatever challenges come rolling in.

For more about Pastor’s work, click on her byline above.